» Is Buying Links A Waste Of Money?

Pro Bloggers constantly preach that content is king, in fact even non-pro bloggers like myself continue to preach that writing compelling content is the key to success. Well written, unique content will attract links from other blogs and pagerank and overall link popularity will increase. Ultimately as these metrics increase, your blog will be able to command more advertising dollars, review prices, etc. The more inbound links, and the higher the quality of the sites linking to you, the higher your page rank will be. Building links is a key part of website development. Google has improved the ability to check inbound (and internal) links to your website via the webmaster tools site.

Many bloggers however are taking a different approach to building links; they’re buying them. Text Link Ads has been growing steadily as more websites are buying and selling links. While it seems to be very effective at the moment, a question that I keep asking myself is whether or not the results will last. In Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines there is this little tidbit:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Currently, as far as I know, none of the search engine algorithms can decipher with 100% accuracy whether or not a link to a website is a paid one, or one that is earned and not paid for. However, with that said, the search engine algorithms are advancing everyday and getting better and better. I believe it is a matter of time before Google develops an algorithm that can spot linking patterns that will identify paid links.

Google’s Matt Cutts wrote a post on his blog about text links and page rank, and said:

Can’t search engines detect paid links?” Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and they work pretty well. But these links make it harder for Google (and other search engines) to determine how much to trust each link. A lot of effort is expended that could be otherwise be spent on improving core quality (relevance, coverage, freshness, etc.).

This quote suggests what will happen once Google can figure out with better accuracy whether or not a link is paid for:

A natural question is: what is Google’s current approach to link buying? Of course our link-weighting algorithms are the first line of defense, but it’s difficult to catch every problem case in adversarial information retrieval, so we also look for problems and leaks in different semi-automatic ways. Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).

So, the links that are bought will not provide as much value as they currently are.

Should You Buy Text Links Now?

In the short term, I feel that text links are worthwhile to purchase. Inbound links are always good, and even when search engines like Google do figure it out and de-value them, they will still be worth something. If not for the extra backlink, if you purchase links on high traffic websites that are in the same niche as your site or blog you may even get some highly targeted traffic. Worst thing that can happen is that once it has been detected that Google has perfected the paid link detection algorithm, is you cancel your paid links and look for other opportunities to increase your page rank. One thing is for sure after reading more into link buying, Google considers it a Black Hat SEO practice. Maybe you should just write better content?

Don’t agree with me? OK, then go sign up and buy some text links at Text Link Ads :) If you haven’t tried buying text links yet, you can take advantage of an offer they are providing at the moment, which is $100 in FREE Links.

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